1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to networked computing systems, and, more particularly, to the management of such systems in response to various conditions.
2. Related Art
In modern networked computing environments, it is often desirable to customize aspects of a network in order to suit specific implementations. In particular, users may wish for various network devices to operate differently, depending on the occurrence of one or more conditions. For example, when an individual network device fails under certain conditions, it may be necessary to disable the failed device. However, under other conditions, it may be advantageous to switch to a backup network device or merely receive notification of the failure.
One prior approach to network customization involves the use of customer-specific command-line interface (CLI) commands provided by a network software provider. Under this approach, the software provider may create specialized CLI commands that cause the network device to implement particular functionality requested by its customers. Unfortunately, such an approach is not always sufficiently flexible to address the changing needs of customers. Typically, customers are forced to remotely access the network device and issue the specialized CLI commands for each desired change in device behavior. Customers are also forced to conform to the particular syntax and potentially limited functionality associated with the commands as implemented by the software provider. Moreover, such specialized CLI commands frequently remain undocumented by the software provider, further complicating their use by customers.
Another approach to network customization involves the use of external polling of network devices. In this approach, scripts or policies running on separate devices external to the network device may poll the device or filter error messages provided by the device in order to determine its status. Nevertheless, such external processes do not necessarily have readily available access to real-time system data of the device. Rather, such processes generally observe systems and networks from the outside and attempt to receive relevant performance data via available communication transports which are often based on restricted low performance polling mechanisms. Indeed, when network devices encounter problems affecting network communications, the devices may be wholly unable to provide any error messages to such external devices or respond to external polling requests.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved approach to network management that overcomes the deficiencies in the prior art as discussed above. In particular, there is a need to provide increased control to users over how network devices behave in response to the occurrence of various network-related events.
Like element numbers in different figures represent the same or similar elements.